Quote Originally Posted by Ryme View Post
I understand where you are coming from, I think we are just coming at it from different angels. Personally, whm's competitiveness is not a big deal to me, it would be neat if it was the best healer but, to me, that's all it would be, neat. Whm isn't even that far behind the other healers atm dps wise, despite having the lowest "rdps," based on fflogs data its less than 5% behind sage (the highest dps). To me whm being simple but engaging and whm being competitive are independent things. I actually do think that the more complex healers should have a little bit more dps and utility for the extra effort that is put in, that makes sense to me. My problem is the lack of care with whm, even in a vacuum whm feels bad right now and it doesn't need to, because (again to me) it doesn't need to be the best to be a well designed job.
That's the thing though, WHM's theoretical competitiveness is all it has left once the mandatory simplicity filter gets applied. It's got the worst oGCDs. Worst MP economy. Worst total damage. Where other healers have utility to fall back on, WHM just has empty pockets because LOL SIMPL means you can't have any of that forbidden flexibility.

The DPS and Tank role, tuning issues aside, have this figured out: if personal damage is all you bring to the table, you get it as your niche. Black Mage outdamages the others because it doesn't have a toolkit of party mitigation, buffs, or a raise. Dark Knight (RIP, flaming trash to play though it may be) doesn't have butt wings or Cover or Shake It Off or Clemency, so it gets damage as its "niche".

Healers take this paradigm and flip it. The more utility and buffs you have, the more powerful your damage gets to be. So you have the baby healer that's designed to play like ass, with weaker heals, weaker damage, and a whole mess of hideous design problems. They make it "the GCD healer", and then refuse to actually reward GCD healing, so you're just left with a class that has to play worse with greater losses than its competition for ~☆reasons☆~. Make it the "personal damage" healer except lol whoops, the other "personal damage" healer craps all over your personal damage *and* has the oGCD kit to actually support that design.

All the healers casting one spell over and over again is horrible, garbage game design, but at LEAST the other three have a glimmer of hope to get Square to figure this out and fix them in the distant future. Crapass no-utility worse damage snoozefest Glarespam is for God knows what reason considered "good" design by a sizable portion of the healer community, so this wretched rathole corner of gleeful mandatory mediocrity WHM is designed into is never going away.